Increasing Sales With Google Analytics Motion Charts

Ok, so first off I know what you’re thinking – motion charts, what the hell is the point? It just looks like some crazy game of pool where the balls seem to shrink and grow at random. Well, I’ve got news for you – I’ve got a motion chart that’s gonna knock your socks off and help you identify what traffic sources you need to work on, it should help you identify the following:

Which sources need more of a push (i.e. not enough visits)

Which sources need their conversion rates improving

Which sources are providing low value orders/customers and need either improving or potentially cutting.

If you improve any of these areas you are likely to increase sales, if you improve more than one the results will be compounded. So increase your average order value by 20% and your conversion rate by 20% and you’ve increased sales from that traffic source by 44%! Without further a do, here is how you go about identifying your most lucrative opportunities:

First of all, this works best if you have ecommerce or goal values setup – but if not, don’t worry, you can still have a go.

1. Login to your Google Analytics Account

2. Goto Traffic > All Traffic Sources

3. Click on the Ecommerce Tab (or one of the Goal tabs if you haven’t got Ecommerce setup)

4. Select source as medium, the date range should be full weeks, and the data should be summarised by week.

7. Change the size to be Average Value (this is the total revenue, divided by the number of transactions, giving the average order value of a conversion).

8. You should see something like this:

9. To analyse this graph take a look at the dimensions, firstly you’ve got visits on the y axis, so the higher up the circle is, the more visits you’re getting from this traffic source.

10. Next take a look at the x axis, the further to the right it is, the higher the conversion rate, ideally you want this as far to the right as possible.

11. Finally make note of the size of the circles, the bigger the circle, the bigger the average order value.

12. Now click play and you should see something like this:

13. Look out for any of the following:

Any large movements, so bouncing left and right, or up and down, or increasing and decreasing in size – all of these means there is potentially opportunities hidden away.

Any circles that seem to be smaller than the rest, but may be providing a lot of traffic or have a high conversion rate – for example if CPC has a small circle but Organic has a big one, then your CPC campaign is most likely underperforming and needs tweaking.

Any steady circles – in other words not much movement/change. So in my example organic was steadily the biggest traffic driver because it was one of our SEO clients 😉 , it had a constant conversion ratio and the circle (average order value) was easily the biggest and stayed roughly the same. These are most likely going to be the traffic sources providing you with your highest traffic – see how their conversion ratios or average order values compare with other traffic sources – perhaps there may be room for improvement?

14. Finally once you do find that there are one or two areas that could do with some further analysis, simply go back to the all traffic sources report, and drill down by medium. So in my example I had a lot of movement for Referrals, so I may want to drill down and see which referrers are performing and which ones may be a good place to advertise – again you can use the same motion chart to drill down within each medium.

6 Comments

[…] Naylor has a couple of recent articles that are interesting. A good one to read is about using the “motion charts” in Google Analytics to find opportunities. But there’s an odder one about Anchor Text. Some of it is confirmation of stuff Matt Cutts […]

Roger Bert

Fantastic post, I love analytics and how much information you can get out of it

Roger Bert

Love the new blog design, it’s great for reading on the mobile

Nina Greaves - http://www.funkypigeon.com

Wow and I thought I knew all about Analytics, I have bookmarked this page. Thank you *bows down*

library management - http://www.microlib.co.uk/

Simple analytics, yet a very few people use the way like this because of ignorance. So, it is adorable you put that lovely graphical method here!!!